OLD SCHOOL

So I finally added pieces from our vintage collections to our online shop. It's been a long time coming - can someone please send me some more hours for my day? But hopefully it's worth the wait because some of these numbers are truly special. Have a look, as they say in Bali when they're trying to flog you a sarong..."looking is free..." (www.mrspress.com)

I could look at a 1920s pintuck for a whole day. Or a 1930s bias cut ruffle. Or a tiny square of crumbly old beading. Heaven. It has to be old though. Last season is exactly that - it’s not vintage.

The thing about real vintage (to my mind anyway, and I know because I am vintage OBSESSED) is that it’s not a waistcoat from 1991; it’s not some old sundress from Katie’s your sister stopped wearing when she moved to the Gold Coast; it’s something very old and wonderful (the 1930s is my favourite era this week) from the 1960s or before. The 70s at a push if its Ossie Clarke or Bill Gibb. Okay, even the 80s, if it’s Wild & Lethal Trash…

It doesn’t matter where you find it. Could be a posh vintage shop or a garage sale. Could be a market or an op shop or an old suitcase in your attic. If it’s beautiful and old and somehow captures the special magic of its era or its maker or its wearer, it’s worth something – and that never goes out of fashion.

A plus tard,
Mrs. Press
xx

INGENIOUS INGE AND HER MAGICAL FASHION MOMENTS

My fab friend Inge Holst creates the most incredible accessories from hand-cut silk petals, velvet bows and vintage jewels. Here are some advance pics of her designs for the Mrs. Press Winter '10 collection, which will hit stores in March. The top guy is my current favourite: a bib of ruffled silk georgette blooms, each one dipped in a weak solution of coffee to give it an aged look, then spiced with vintage 1930s glass buttons and fastened with a velvet ribbon.

Yesterday, she showed me the treasures she's been dreaming up for next summer - O.M.G.!! They are AMAZING. So this is what happiness looks like...I've often wondered.
A plus tard,
Mme. Press

WINNERS' CIRCLE

Images from Style.com (Credit: Monica Feudi / GoRunway.com)

Every so often, when the world seems suffocatingly grey and bland and blah, along comes a genuine shot of magic so exciting and inspiring as to to render further superlatives pointless, indeed any explanation or comment - even wondering at the construction of those resplendant pouffes and bows and ruffles, or the fab Cecil Beaton-worthy stage set - redundant. The only thing to do is enjoy it. And how cool does Johnny G look in his posh white jodhpurs? LOVE LOVE LOVE the new Dior couture.

TRUE CONFESSION

Oh dear. I have a shameful secret. A truly hideous secret life, guaranteed to shock all fashionable players.

My name is Clare Press and I am a horoscope addict. Or should that be "an horoscope" addict? I do so love the affected way Lord Peter Wimsey in the Dorothy L. Sayers novels says "an hotel". "Take me to an hotel!" "Read me out an horo'scope!" Why don't we still talk like that? And why don't we go in for the crisp BBC English-style rolling of the rrrrrs anymore? Why is that deemed so verrreh, verreh old-fashioned?

Sometimes I hate modern stuff and truly wish I were living in a 1930s detective novel - although not dying in one, please. My stars couldn't help me out of that one.

So what form does this verrreh, verreh embarrassing habit take? The answer is this: I not only devour the cruddy Stars pages of the tabloids each day in search of hints on how to get through life; I also subscribe to Jonathan Cainer's Five Star Service, the one where he tells you, o'er the internet, about your destiny for the week in his dreamy, therapist tones.

It's pathetic, I know, but also oddly comforting. Cainer just cooed that there is "no such thing as a situation which is ever going to totally satisfy every requirement and fulfill every need. There will always be something we can find fault with"...but apparently that's not where my focus and concentration should be.

Good-oh! Note to self: Stop being a whingeing bitch, then. Sound advice Mister Cainer. Chic advice too. Now take me to an hotel!


www.youtube.com/watch?v=hByKYoFkb6o&feature=related

www.cainer.com

Museworthy: Paloma Picasso, 1949 -

Picasso's daughter was one of Yves Saint Laurent's trio of muses (the other two being Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise) and with her shining ebony crop and signature vermilion pout she did the designer's harlequin patterns and gypsy/opera chic proud.

My favourite story about Paloma? One told by Alicia Drake in her unputdownable book, The Beautiful Fall (which, incidentally, it was strongly suggested I didn't review while at Oz Vogue lest I piss off Kaiser Karl and his advertising dollar). Anyway, this particular tale tells of the 21-year-old spring chicken of a painter's daughter posing for a photo shoot by Peter Schlesinger (Mrs. David Hockney at the time). Our Pal was wearing ginormous wedge heels, so precarious that she try as she might, she couldn't stay upright. She promptly fell down a flight of steps and broke her foot, but Schlesinger got his shot - of his subject in giggles. So you see P.P. was tough as well as gorgeous, even as a kid.

Drake's book isn't tough - it's fantabulous. I borrowed it from my friend Emily and never gave it back. Now I come to think of it, both Drake and Emily are pretty good contenders for this collumn. Museworthy? Definitely.
Adios...xx

Museworthy: Alice Delall, 1987 -

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it the new Jerry Hall? The latter, clearly - if Jezza had braved an undercut and an eye-brow piercing. Delall posed as Jerry for French Vogue, and pulled it off with aplomb.

So who she? Forget Gisele, our Alice is London's favourite Brazilian. Her dad is a property magnate (wish mine was) and sister Charlotte makes smart shoes, all of which is as irrelevant, as far as we're concerned, as her friendship with the Geldof wild child crew. So why is she worthy of our style attentions? Those endless legs, the good-as-Hall pose and the whatever attitude. A posh punk princess for our times mehtinks.